After some preseason friction among league rights holders, NBC Sports is altering how it measures and reports its NFL viewership, beginning with Wednesday’s season opener between the Patriots and Seahawks.
Industry sources tell Front Office Sports that the Comcast-owned NBC Sports will report its NFL audiences using Nielsen’s established methodology for measuring linear television and streaming.
Previously, NBC Sports had reported its NFL viewership using its own Total Audience Delivery (TAD) figures, which combine Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel measurement with digital data from Adobe Analytics. That approach, however, increasingly ran afoul of both Nielsen and rival networks, who complained about NBC Sports using blended audience data.
The issue came to a head this summer during the recent FIFA men’s World Cup, when Fox issued viewership releases using strictly Nielsen data, but the NBCUniversal-owned Telemundo relied on that TAD blend of Nielsen and Adobe figures, and also touted its rising appeal during the tournament with non-Spanish speakers.
In the wake of that, Nielsen heightened its scrutiny around competitive claims made by networks using blended audience data. The agency recently told networks that “mixing internal or third-party data with Nielsen metrics to make comparative statements in the press is not permissible.”
